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Adulteration: an overview of tainting our health

research
  • 02 Nov
  • 2020

Food demands increase day by day and people are adamant about the way it tastes. They are not willing to do any compromises in their food products, the way they taste and seem. But the important thing is that they are keeping a blind eye on the ingredients and composition of the food product. It is very significant to check on the authenticity of our food. The nutritional value can be somewhat ignored but the number of preservatives and chemicals intake cannot be just neglected.

Food adulteration happens all around the world and is a global concern. It is an intentional process of adding adulterant substances to keep the food more appealing by altering the quality of the food product. They add or simply substitute less quality or cheap products and thereby resulting in the extermination of more valuable quality substance. It is a huge issue that food management is facing, even though some amount of adulterants are allowed in certain foods by some countries. But when the limit exceeds, it will end on resulting serious health problems. Therefore the need to check on the food adulteration process is much relevant.

Food scientists have various methods to find out the amount of adulterant in a food, the detection requires the obtaining of the sample, cross-checking it and then undergoing high-end technological experiments. The process requires more effort which is quite difficult and time-consuming.

In order to meet this limitation, new technological developments were made for a faster and easier determination of the presence of food adulterants. The emerging rapid online methods is a new trend happening in food science and technology. But their concentration has now shifted into a simpler application level, ie, a detection technology or method which does not require a well-trained individual. The aim is to be able to detect the adulteration even in our own home by a less trained person. So that we can keep a check in the number of adulterants in our daily routine. Food science technology has been constantly trying in detecting the unnecessary substances which could harm our health. But unfortunately, it has been hiking up amidst the efforts made by those people to protect the consumers from serious troubles.